A mayor rolls up his sleeves
When the earthquake struck western Colombia this week, the mayor of Cali did not convene a commission to study the feasibility of getting to work. He got to work. NPR's report on it is almost embarrassingly simple: a public official, faced with rubble, did the job the voters gave him.
Why does this feel almost quaint to report? Perhaps because we have grown so used to leadership as performance — statements, photo ops, blame assigned before the dust settles — that a mayor simply doing his job reads like news. It shouldn't. Contribution, not commentary, is the oldest form of neighbourliness there is.
But work has a ceiling
The same week brings a less comfortable story: conditions aboard a US aircraft carrier at sea for more than 250 days are, per NPR, raising alarms. Sailors did not choose an earthquake; they chose a contract, one that presumably did not include a quarter of a year without reliable shore leave, in whatever cramped and salt-worn conditions that implies.
Here is where the dignity-of-work argument earns its keep or reveals itself as a slogan. If "those who can should contribute" is a moral truth, it cuts both ways. Societies that ask citizens to serve — in uniform, in office, on a ferry, on a factory floor — owe those citizens something in return: rest, safety, an end date. A carrier that cannot come home is not proof of dedication. It may be proof that someone, somewhere, stopped counting the cost of other people's endurance.
When "just doing the job" becomes the problem
Consider, too, this week's smaller and stranger headline: ICE reportedly plans to issue officers electric-shock gloves. Set aside for a moment whether the device works as advertised. Ask instead what it signals about the idea of work being invoked. "I was just doing my job" is one of the oldest phrases in the authoritarian phrasebook — used to explain away everything from petty bureaucratic cruelty to far graver abuses. Work dignifies a person when it serves a shared, accountable purpose. It degrades everyone involved when the tools of the job start to outpace the judgment behind them.
This is the line worth drawing, gently but firmly: contribution is a virtue; compliance is not automatically one. A citizen who works, pays in, and shows up for the collective is doing something honourable. An officer handed a shock glove and told it's part of "doing the job" is being asked to confuse obedience with dignity — and that confusion is exactly how authoritarian habits get their foot in the door, one procurement order at a time.
The reciprocity test
The golden rule is not sentimental — it is a working test. Would the person authorising 250 days at sea accept it for their own child? Would the official ordering shock gloves want one used on a neighbour who overstayed a permit by mistake? If the honest answer is no, the policy fails the only test that matters, regardless of how efficient it looks on a budget line.
None of this argues against contribution. A society that lets capable citizens sit idle, that treats work as beneath dignity rather than a source of it, invites its own decline — resentment breeds faster in idleness than in effort, and compassion for those who genuinely cannot work is undermined, not strengthened, by pretending everyone is in that category. The Cali mayor's instinct — see the need, go do the thing — is the correct civic reflex, and worth admiring without irony.
But admiration for work is not a licence to work people, or arm people, past the point of dignity. The measure of a mature democracy is not only how eagerly its citizens contribute. It is whether the state remembers to ask, before it hands out the next long deployment or the next new gadget: are we still building something worth serving — or have we simply found a nicer word for using people up?